The Brave web browser is a favourite of crypto fans, because it has a crypto in it — the Basic Attention Token (BAT) ERC-20 token. It appears the browser renders YouTube data to look like you can donate to a YouTube channel … even if they’re not signed up for BAT at all. This exploded on Twitter on Friday, when a viewer asked British YouTuber Tom Scott if he was getting his BAT donations — and Tom was not pleased in the slightest with Brave’s claim to represent him, when they didn’t in any way at all.

Brave have apparently released an updated version of the browser with new wording — which still doesn’t really make it clear that the supposed recipient never signed up for this and has nothing to do with it — and they’ll keep defaulting to taking “donations” on behalf of people who haven’t signed up at all. Amy Castor has a story coming on all of this in The Block shortly. edit: story is up now.

(And the image in this post from last November suggests you can donate to Wikipedia this way. Wikimedia legal don’t tolerate this sort of fundraising fraud for a second.)

Jackson Palmer details how, even when you do sign up with Brave/BAT as a publisher, the system is hilariously terrible and utterly, utterly centralised.

Upon clicking "Send a tip…" it opens this tipping page which has @tomscott's name, image etc. yet no indication he hasn't opted-in for receiving BAT tips. Quite misleading. pic.twitter.com/GJGAZcxxTp

But the institutional investors will save the Bitcoin price! … oh. “Participation by financial institutions in Bitcoin trading appears to be fading. Key flow metrics have downshifted dramatically.” The CME and CBOE Bitcoin futures are losing interest. The investment banks built crypto products — but the investors haven’t shown up.

World’s luckiest Bitcoin margin trader — Mark Dow shorted Bitcoin at the peak, and cashed out at the bottom. “I’m done … I don’t want to try to squeeze more out of the lemon.” Here’s his blog post shortly before he opened his position — there’s no details on where and how he set up the short.

NUMBER GO UP, December 2017 — Meltem Demirors sees a “much bigger run coming in 2018 when more products and more instruments come to market.”NUMBER GO DOWN, December 2018 — actually it’s about the technology, OK,

The Hong Kong Stock Exchange is reluctant to approve the Bitmain IPO — “The exchange is very hesitant to actually approve these bitcoin mining companies because the industry is so volatile. There’s a real risk that they could just not exist any more in a year or two.”

NiceHash competitor WinMiner — a miner for casual users, which shuffled between coins for you, according to which was most profitable to mine that day — has gone into “hibernation” as so many home miners give up.

How’s Bitcoin mining going? Nicholas Weaver posts this graph — when half the peak mining capacity is “dark”, that dark capacity can be used to launch 51% attacks, if that’s more profitable.

When the Bitcoin hash rate drops down to the red line, Bitcoin will be neither efficient NO secure as this will be the point when the available & unused hashing is enough to launch a 51% attack on Bitcoin: pic.twitter.com/Pne0AEZTIz

HMRC has issued UK tax guidance on how to account for your crypto earnings. “HMRC does not consider the buying and selling of cryptoassets to be the same as gambling” — that is, unlike with gambling, your winnings are taxable and you can claim your losses.

The Etherpocalypse continues. ConsenSys has been reported, with a considerable pile of sources, to be firing a lot of people — or spinning a lot of its “spokes” (incubated entities that ConsenSys owned 50% of) out as separate entities that couldn’t possibly survive — though they now deny this.

Software developer site InfoQ has been doing a blockchain panel discussion by email. Part 1 has John Davies (Velo Payments) and Conor Svensson (author of web3j), and Part 2 has me and Richard Gendal-Brown of R3. We also recorded an hour of discussion (without Richard, annoyingly) last Tuesday, which will go up at some point.

Christmas gifts of copies of @davidgerard book 'Attack of the 50ft blockchain' for all my dev team along with the story of how I swapped them for a laser printer have gone down well 🙂

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The content of this site is journalism and personal opinion. Nothing contained on this site is, or should be construed as providing or offering, investment, legal, accounting, tax or other advice. Do not act on any opinion expressed here without consulting a qualified professional. I do not hold a position in any crypto asset or cryptocurrency or blockchain company.